"No-Execute Memory Protection" BIOS setting

[lightxx]

hi guys!

while BIOS-upgrading our blade center (HP BL460c blades) i realized that the "No-Execute Memory Protection" setting was turned off everywhere. google, however, told me that turning on this setting would be a clever thing to do. the only problem is changing this BIOS setting results in our esx servers (3.5.0 / 64607; Infrastructure Center 2.5) complaining that the CPU is now different than it was at the point the VMs were created, and thus won't vmotion them. this kinda sucks because i don't really want to mess around with CPUID masks.

any ideas how to get around this? is there an easy hack to make the VMs vmotion again? or just leave the setting as it was, turned off?

thanks in advance,

• Tom

EDIT: shutting down the guests, moving them to an different esx server with "No-Execute Memory Protection" turned on, starting them there, enables me to vmotion them between those servers which also have this setting turned on. weird...

[dinny]

Hiya,

You can set a cpu mask on your VMs so that these type of cpu incompatibilities are ignored in the pre-vmotion checks

In the VI client, rt click on the VM, edit settings, select the "options" tab, click on advanced, then look in the CPU Identification Mask

You can just mask the NX flag - or you can mask other advanced features (search the vmtn forums and/or google for more info)

Dinny

[lightxx]

thanks for your response!

i found out that shuting down the gues OS, then the ESX server itself, then enabling the BIOS setting and starting up again does the trick. no CPUID mask needed.

-Tom

[dinny · Accepted solution]

That's OK if all your hardware supports the same cpu settings - obviously if they are all the same - then there are no compatabilities to mask.

If some ESX hardware supports some cpu functionality, and some doesn't - that is when you do need to mask out the incompatabilities

Dinny